Infosys-Oracle Blog

R12 was a major release for OPM in the sense it merges process inventory with discrete inventory which resulted into streamlining of inventory operations & better integration with Order Management, Purchasing etc. Another change was the introduction of SLA for OPM, which finally hit the nail in coffin for much criticized MAC module. Afterwards, there are lots of enhancements like Multi-batch operations, Make-to-Order Functionality, Landed cost management etc.  We now even have validated integration between 3rd party Regulatory document generation partners and OPM Regulatory Management. But, something was still missing. Something that process manufacturer is demanding from Oracle from long time??

Continue reading " OPM & Outside Processing: When will they meet?? " »

Posted by Ashish Namdeo at 6:34 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Rakesh Kumar, Industry Principal, Service Innovation Strategy, Infosys

Continue reading " Video: Social CRM - Delivering the Next Generation Customer Experience " »

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Guest post by
Nikhil Kumar, Industry Principal, Infosys

Yet another exciting day here at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 started off with drizzling rain and San Francisco downtown bustling traffic. The exhibition halls got opened immediately after the morning keynotes around 10 am, and attracted a lot of attention and larger footsteps from customers and partners than yesterday. We could see people rushing and hopping across sessions, venues and exhibition booths and long queues for raffles and gifts offered by partners. Some folks are also relaxing with their iPads and smartphones at lounges browsing, catching up mails and chatting. Mobility can be noticed and felt all around at OpenWorld.

Continue reading " Experiencing 'Mobility' at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 " »

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Guest post by
Neeraj Jha, Lead Consultant, Infosys

Some of the challenges that I can think of based on my experience and interaction with colleagues working in BI Support are due to -

• Business implements changes in enterprise applications and hence the source systems for BI gets modified
• Change in data archiving and purging
• End users start writing their own queries for self-use and difference in queries being written by the BI Support team
• Increment in data size
• Tuning & Performance needs due to user created queries absorbing capacity
• Correcting the data in source after seeing wrong data in warehouse through BI System
• Usage of proper Tools
• Data security needs as user base increases
• Upgrade in source system resulting change in source system database structure
• Continued challenges to build new

Continue reading " Achieving excellence in BI Support " »

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Guest post by
Kamaljeet Singh Bhatia, Lead Consultant, Infosys

The last few decades has witnessed numerous examples of significant competitive advantages through supply chain integration. Information sharing through superior technology is making enterprises capable to innovate and integrate in the complex networked environment. However information integration in supply chains is limited to large enterprises and small to medium scale enterprises (SME's) significantly lag to leverage technology for supply chain integration.

Continue reading " Impediments to supply chain integration: An SME perspective " »

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Guest post by
Nipun Lakhotia, Consultant, Infosys

Automobile sector is currently experiencing a turbulent transition. Apart from product innovation, manufacturers need to align their supply chain processes to meet rapidly changing customer expectations.

Logistics plays a crucial role in automotive industry, representing about 40% of the retail price of a passenger car. Historically the automotive industry has always been focused on just-in-time manufacturing (JIT) which demands for sequenced deliveries. Inbound operational planning is expected to support advanced features like milk runs, direct delivery and cross-dock optimization with drop-trailer capabilities.

Continue reading " Automobile Logistics: Demand to Deliver (D2D) " »

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Guest post by
Srinath Pydimarri, Senior Consultant, Infosys

I've been a loyal customer of a particular Indian bank, whom I'd call Bank XYZ for convenience sake. My perception of loyalty stems from the fact that I've been banking with them for the whole of my professional life, have taken multiple loans, setup FDs and have their credit card. I've always been prompt at paying my EMIs as well as credit card bill. In fact, some of their Customer Support executives address me as a 'privileged customer'. However, what pains me is that they haven't increased the credit limit on my credit card. It surely has left me surprised and disappointed. In fact, I keep advising my friends to take the credit card from a competing bank. Something which I tend to do using social media as well - Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly the bank still perceives me to be a 'loyal' and a ' privileged' customer. I believe this is a scenario which commonly occurs across all industries and with all types of customers (retail / business  etc). 'Social' customers today are increasingly using social media to constantly share their opinions/displeasure, amongst other things, about the brands / products they use. Such a behavior is nothing unlike the Word of Mouth (WoM) that organizations have known for a long time now. The only difference is that this has become easier, more prevalent and has greater impact, thanks to the availability and extensive usage of social channels.

Continue reading " Revisiting Customer Loyalty from a 'social' angle " »

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Guest post by
Sandeep Suresh Deshpande, Principal Consultant, Infosys

In today's world, business is exposed to a constantly changing environment where organizations face the most challenging situations -

• Information silos across the value chain
• Parallel processing amongst distributed systems
• Mismatched products to support complex end-to-end business processes
• Complex and long-running projects
• Real-time project consolidation and budgeting

Oracle has done an extensive internal and external research, took the best practices from Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle JD Edwards, Oracle Siebel and all other acquisitions to come up with a number of industry business process areas with multiple levels of decomposition. These world class business processes can be leveraged to deliver in the complex and challenging environment.

Continue reading " Leveraging Fusion Business Process Model Methodology in Project Portfolio Management (PPM) " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Abhishek Sabharwal, Head- Infosys Oracle Innovation Center

Finally, we are here again on the helm of one of the biggest IT events of our times, Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) 2011. As the feeling of nostalgia triggers in with everyone beating each other about the number of years they had been participating in the OOW, the registration lines grew bigger and bigger. The weather, the excitement, iphone tunes and bustling traffic remained the same at SFO but the event seems to gets bigger and better, with representations from 120 countries and close to 45000 registrants.  OOW started on a Green note of using minimum paper throughout the event, so no more bulky schedule. All replaced by mobile phone apps, and real time online updates...welcome Social Media and Mobility to the OOW...

Continue reading " Day 1 at OOW 2011 : The 'Green' and the 'Machines' " »

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Guest post by
Peter Stacholy, Industry Principal, Infosys

My session at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 - "Innovation in the Staffing Industry with Oracle Real-Time Decisions", will show how to use a new Oracle Tool RTD (Real Time Decisions) to leverage the data already stored in your ERP system to transform your company into a predictive enterprise. We will be using a Staffing Company to illustrate all the points where we want to integrate existing ERP applications with RTD. We will show all of the points where RTD can 'learn' current enterprise behavior and subsequently predict future outcomes or suggest better ways to do things. We will conclude by demonstrating a current integration that we have already built out between PeopleSoft Staffing Front Office and RTD that ranks candidates for open positions using six dimensions that an ordinary search engine cannot evaluate!

Continue reading " Building the Predictive Enterprise " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Puneet Gupta, AVP and Head - Infosys Mobile Platforms, Infosys

Continue reading " Video: Mobile CRM - Delivering the Next Generation Customer Experience " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Shanmugam Gnanasambandam, Principal Consultant, Infosys

Today, enterprises have CRM systems/applications implemented to support their Marketing, Sales and Service functions, which have matured, over the last two decades as an On-Premise Application and also being offered now as an On Demand Application, for access through Desktops/Laptops.

The significant progress of mobile internet, which includes availability of a wide range of affordable smart phones/tablets, high speed internet connectivity on mobile devices and users becoming more and more tech savvy, has created a keen interest in the Mobile CRM space.

Continue reading " Mobile CRM is not a choice, but a necessity for Enterprises " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Sushal Subashchandra Shetty, Consultant, Infosys

Are you not able to define effective territories for your sales organization?

Is your sales team swimming in the sea without targets?

Is your sales team cherry picking on prospects and you are not aware how to tackle it?

Are you losing track of your sales team's performance?

If answer to all/one of the above questions is yes, then my cent that you ought to read this further. The top problems which one of the large manufacturing company was facing were loss of productivity due to redundant and manual process, lack of consistent and efficient reporting, inaccurate commissioning.

If you are also facing the same problems as above then sales planning solution based on Oracle Fusion Applications is the one-stop solution for you.

Continue reading " Effective Sales Planning with Oracle Fusion Sales Planning Solution " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Srinath Pydimarri, Senior Consultant, Infosys

I have been observing the Social CRM market space for the last 1 year and the first impression I get is that organizations are far more closer to the reality of Social CRM - both in terms of their interest in Social CRM and the availability of suitable Social CRM solution options. Our frequent conversations with client organizations have gradually moved from being centered around 'What is Social CRM' to discussions on how Social CRM can be applied in the organization's context. In fact, a handful of our customers are coming up with specific scenarios where they'd like to see Social CRM in play. In many of the cases, however, we observe a sense of uncertainty and a few misgivings accompanying the tangible intent in taking up Social CRM, something that is common whenever organizations are faced with the prospect of new concepts and technologies. Organizations do seem to have a difficult time deciding what their first steps in Social CRM should be. I believe they can deal with this tricky situation by taking hints from the success stories that are slowly stemming around in the Social CRM space.

Continue reading " Giving Wings to your Social CRM Dreams " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Rohit Kaul, Senior Technology Architect, Infosys

I happened to read about a Greek philosopher in my kids school books and it reminded me of my school days where we read about methods of learning via questioning. It must have taken a great deal of courage from that man to question and challenge the existing set ups and systems. As it turns out his methodology is what comes naturally to all of us in IT (constantly questioning and brainstorming on the best solutions).

Continue reading " What to ask about the Exadata machine before the purchase decision? " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Abhishek Prasad Verma, Lead Consultant, Infosys

Power sector historically has been late in adopting IT to enable and streamline its business processes. The same is evident in its archaic operations and built in inefficiencies. However recently there has been a considerable effort by the utilities to look for all available options to improve operational efficiency in various field of operation like customer services, metering, billing etc. for improved customer services & tariff rationalization. So is the case with Asset Management System. In the first wave of transformation, the industry is looking forward to go softer and leaner i.e. it is exploring IT to replace its "Hard Book" based archaic manual systems.

Continue reading " Asset Management in Electricity Distribution Utility: "The Challenges of Getting Softer" " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Steven Stein, Principal Consultant, Infosys

I am proud to discuss this year at Oracle OpenWorld something we do as consultants for large organizations. This presentation was originally given during a state government implementation. State government reporting is like doing an implementation for 50 different major companies simultaneously. They all had complex statutory obligations, different legacy tools, and different user communities. The leadership of the implementation team wanted to better understand how OBIEE would be able to schedule reports, handle security for such a massive audience, integrate with their portal and ERP system, and what were the benefits of moving off the old tools such as SQR and Crystal. As our team prepared the presentation and were doing rehearsals, we kept switching from one persona to another, saying that the administrator would do this, and then the end user would see this, and these features would be like what an operational user would see, but a manager would want to see something else. My manager said, "why don't we split up this presentation into segments by four different personas." When we did this, it changed everything and made the whole thing so much clearer.

Continue reading " Four Types of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Users " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Nipun Lakhotia, Consultant, Infosys

All organisations are bugged with 'Go Green' mantra. Carbon reduction is no longer an environmental decision that is forced upon as an obligation. Emergence of carbon trading and related economic benefits has evolved carbon emission reduction as one of the strategic decision. Even customers are willing to pay premium for offerings with greener credentials.

Backbone of any green supply chain is the green transportation processes - from planning to execution. As per report by leading supply chain journal, as much as 75 per cent of a company's carbon footprint comes from transportation and logistics alone. This provides a strong business case for incorporating mechanisms that reduce carbon footprint in transportation supply chain.

Continue reading " Transporting into a Greener Supply Chain " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Vinayak Gangadhar Kurdekar, Technology Lead, Infosys

Businesses today need to increasingly leverage a unified platform to host all their database and applications at one place. To meet this challenge, Oracle has designed the Exadata server technology that bundles database and applications together to provide high performance, high availability, scalability and throughput. Mere implementation of the exadata server and its components is not enough. Disasters can strike at anytime. To ensure survivability and safeguard against any major disasters, effective backup and recovery solution is a must. The backup and recovery strategy needs to be not only precise but proven in all aspects. To achieve this Oracle has come out with multiple backup and recovery solutions designed in-house and third party.

1. Disk based backup and recovery.
2. Tape based backup and recovery.
3. Backup and recovery using dataguard.

Continue reading " BACKUP and RECOVERY in EXADATA " »

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Guest post by
Swati Maskara, Senior Associate Consultant, Infosys

The Economics of Cloud Computing is by now well established with its claim to reduce cost, improve efficiency and decrease time consumption when a cloud environment is used by a business.

With respect to Business Intelligence there is a need to understand dynamics of cloud computing for performing business analytics. The article intends to do so by addressing few questions around Cloud computing:

• How Cloud qualifies as an efficient platform for performing Business analytics?
• How is Cloud model different from SaaS?
• How organizations can derive maximum value from a Cloud setup and what are the major challenges?

The article discusses these aspects in detail to bring forth the view point that Cloud model for performing BI is undoubtedly going to restructure and modernize IT within organizations.

Continue reading " Cloudanomics for Business Intelligence " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Karan Chadha, Associate Consultant, Infosys

In Part 1 of this blog, I had talked about the immense potential that Social Media data holds for getting transformed into business insights. In Part 2 I moved on to discuss Social Media Intelligence (SMI) tools and the key value adds that they provide to Organizations. I will now move on to the piece that is the most relevant for us; the piece about integrating SMI tools with conventional reporting tools like OBIEE and establishing an integrated reporting environment; an environment which leverages insights from structured enterprise data as well as fluid social data.

Let me touch upon two facets of what is now broadly known as Social BI:

• Transforming generic insights offered by SMI tools into actionable customer specific insights
• Richer customer insights by leveraging social data in conjunction with traditional data

Continue reading " Can Social Media be the next big lever for Business Intelligence? - Part 3 " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Chandru Narain Amarnani, Senior Technology Architect, Oracle Practice, Infosys

Oracle Exadata has become a buzz word in the industry especially when looking for a solution which can handle massive information of data, managing them cost effectively, and most importantly accessing these data with high performance. The Sun Oracle Database Machine (as it is referred) is quickly getting accepted as the ultimate solution for Online Transaction Processing(OLTP), Data Warehousing and consolidation of mixed workloads delivering extreme performance, high availability and scalability. One of the key enabler of this is the Exadata Smart Flash Cache.

Continue reading " Exadata Smart Flash Cache " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Amit Zutshi, Lead Consultant, Oracle Practice, Infosys

How fast things can change and how quickly innovations can alter the competitive and business landscape is playing itself out best in the mobility arena today. Taking a real life example, I was witness to my friend's smartphone search and subsequent order from a manufacturer whom he was shunning as recently as four months back. At almost USD 700, it was not the cheapest phone on the block and hence "value-for-money" was definitely not a driving factor to embrace a hitherto novice in the smartphone domain. Visibly much happier now, my friend can't stop gushing about how his phone beats the wits out of the pioneer in its space. So, what happened in just four months?

Continue reading " Enterprise Mobility Trends to Watch For " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Rohit Kaul, Senior Technology Architect, Oracle Practice, Infosys

We all know about Exadata as a fast and scalable database solution for most of the enterprise applications. So the next natural question would be - what is the best migration path from current version, platform to the Exadata platform. The basic thought to keep in mind is simply that the target platform is always fixed and would always be an Oracle database version 11gR2 with ASM on a Linux platform (Oracle Enterprise Linux x86_64 (OEL5)) or on Solaris Express - So it is to be treated like just another migration from an Oracle DB/non-Oracle database to another Oracle 11gR2 database on OEL5/Solaris Express platform. So before one embarks on the migration journey one needs to make sure that the application is certified on Oracle database 11gR2. In this blog, I will cover a few preferred migration options and not the exhaustive list, since there would be multiple permutations/ combinations of other possible options considering several factors.

Continue reading " Myriad of options for migration to Exadata " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Umesh Tanna, Senior Technology Architect, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys

In Part-1 of this blog we found that Exadata has many features that facilitates database consolidation. This blogs describes those features and explains how it helps in database consolidation.

Database Resource Manager (DBRM)

If we are consolidating multiple databases say for ex. A and B into a single database AB, DBRM would help us control how much resources to allocate to process/programs/sessions of A and B while they run in shared database AB. Basically this enables us to control how CPU are shared amongst A and B and also establish the priorities.  This is implemented with what is known as resource allocation scheme amongst the consumer groups defined within database. Also the allocation scheme changes are dynamic i.e. we can have one resource allocation scheme effective during business hours and can have different during after business hours.

Continue reading " Oracle Exadata - A platform for consolidation (Part-2) " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )